Effective Meetings

Hey - It’s Michael.

Had a pretty inspiring lunch with a dear friend the other day. Enjoy the newsletter!

You open your calendar and it’s full of meetings. Rationally you get why you should do them, but something feels off. At the end of the week, you realize you spent most of your time talking to people, but never doing any real work. You even wonder what most of those meetings were for.

Or worse: you knew what the meetings were for, but it took way too long to get what you needed. So yet again you wasted your peers’ and your own precious life time discussing something that should have never been discussed in the first place.

Any meeting that is prepared well, usually turns out to be a good meeting.

To prepare a meeting well, fill this simple framework:

Principle:

Be clear on purpose, outcome & agenda for any meeting you attend do.

After some time of following that framework, you’ll realize that - depending on your line of work - there’s really just a few types of meetings. Each type having a similar purpose & outcome:

It pays to understand which type of meeting you are preparing / attending in order to act effectively.

There are of course aspects to meetings that are invisible to that framework - like social connection & building trust. I’d argue however that there are more effective ways of building those than using the pretense of some work meeting for it.

Find clarity on who is accountable for organizing & reaching the goal of the meeting. (This if of course requires clarity of accountability in your organization.)

Even if you are the one being invited: Fill the framework for the next meeting you attend to. Afterwards, compare what you prepared vs. what happened - you might just realize it were 2 completely different things.

My best guess is, you’ll soon start to follow the

Stop Rule:

Refuse to accept any meeting without clear purpose, outcome & agenda.

And - out of respect for your own & other’s time - you’ll start preparing any meeting you invite others the same way.

To follow this rule, you’ll of course have to have some tact for social interactions, especially if it’s with people outside of your organization. My experience is that asking & clarifying beforehand already reveals a lot.

People almost always appreciate my honesty & preparation when I run them through the purpose, outcome & agenda - even if it’s someone I meet for the first time.

Never underestimate the power of clarity in communication.

If you’re curious about some cultural guidelines to make meetings much more effective, a notion template or some real meeting I prepared - please reply to this email. If you just wanna say Hi, you can do that too.

“The most dangerous risk of all - the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” - Randy Komisar

Which tough conversation am I avoiding?

See you next week - Michael

PS:

I’m aware that I used the word “meeting” 22 times. Let’s just giggle about it.

PPS:

Please share this with someone in your organization who’s eager to improve things.